I feel like I was dragged by my hands tied to a long rope on a car and dragged through mud and dirt while the car drove at 100 miles per hour. This first week on the keto diet and intermittent fasting had been tough. I feel ragged and beaten down, though I managed to stick through the strict requirements. 

What’s keto?

Basically a keto diet is one that’s focused on making your body switch from burning carbs and sugar as a main fuel, to using fat (in a physiological process called ketosis). To make that switch, you have to almost cut away carbs completely, to a fat-focused diet - 75% (quality) fats, 20% proteins, 5% carbs. The crab intake of 5% is really low, and you can hit that amount without even intentionally planning to eat any carbs (because vegetables, nuts and other fat/protein foods you eat have some tiny amount of carbs). Intermittent fasting further helps your body go into ketosis by fasting for at least 16h within a day - I do that fast from 8pm till 12noon. Basically, skipping breakfast.

Why keto?

I was tempted to try keto because I wanted to get in better shape and health. At age 40, metabolism slow-downs doesn’t make keeping in shape easy, so it felt like more drastic measures are needed. I’m not overly obese, yet overall I’d been putting on more weight, getting softer and flabbier everywhere, and growing an obvious belly. There’s also a growing concern that much of my diet consisted of processed wheat flour, ultra-refined sugars and milk, which I’m eager to cut off but always failed. Even our Asian staple the white rice, is something that’s increasingly becoming a highly processed grain with empty calories. Everywhere, I see common local foods that are cheap and popular but nutritionally deficient, and in the long term, dangerous. If I am to leap above and ahead on my health trajectory (since our habits tend to be ten years behind our current age/health), I need to try something new and drastic.

My first week of carbs cold turkey

Through this first week, I think I cycled through all of the symptoms of keto flu (a kind of withdrawal symptoms from carbs and sugar) on the list:

• overall weakness on the first 2 days, because the body was still burning reserve sugar resources in the body and felt like it was starving. Continuing my regular running schedule was challenging, to say the least.
• queasiness from too much oil and fat, which I later realised I need something like tea to help counter the greasiness in the tummy.
• poor sleep due to nighttime waking. It’s a strange experience waking up completely alert in the middle of the night. Usually even if I got woken up, I’m still groggy and half way in between dream state and awake state. But not this time. Full alert on arrival. This happened a few night in a row.
• headaches, brain fog due to sleep lack and adjustment issues. Hard to be productive tbh!
• sugar cravings like cold turkey. Like @brandonwilson said, that’s just my body rebelling against me. It wants to go back to what it was used to for the past 40 years. No easy habit to break.

Thoughts on habit formation

Keto was a much harder habit to form because of the almost all-or-nothing approach needed for the body to switch to ketosis. I can try the downscaling a habit technique and cut my carb intake slowly and incrementally, but that will probably prolong the pains of keto flu. It’s a habit that sounds easy in theory (just cut carbs - duh!) but is actually hard in practice. Until I tried keto, I never realised how deeply entrenched refined carbs and sugars are in our daily diets, even though I had been trying to eat healthy for years. So doing keto is basically trying to form a habit in a high friction environment, with cues and nudges at home and outside designed to make you fail every step along the way. It reminded me of my years as a vegan in a meat-loving world - same experience, same obstacles. Trying to avoid carbs in a food court as a newbie without good knowledge of what foods are keto-friendly, is like walking in a minefield. Traps everywhere.

Rewards to take the heat off the hard work

It’s been a tough week. But I made it through. So as a reward, I checked out a keto bakery and rewarded myself with a keto-friendly cupcake. That sweetness! How I missed it. Thankfully it was a natural sweetener called Erythritol that didn’t add carbs or sugar to the diet. If it’s as healthy as it makes out to be, I’m having all my sweet treats in the future to be keto-friendly! Though a cautionary note from the experts say that taking too much of these keto sweets might backfire as it prolongs our addiction to sweets….*shrugs ?‍♂️ That weakness to sweets is the next high bar to overcome for me.